


and we know it's never simple, never easy

by cerie



Category: Arctic Air
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-23
Updated: 2012-02-23
Packaged: 2017-10-31 14:54:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/345365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cerie/pseuds/cerie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Krista/Blake implied, Krista/Bobby UST; Spoilers for Arctic Air 1x07: "Vancouver is such a screwed up city." Krista second-guesses her decision to take Blake back and muses that maybe the right thing and the easy thing aren't always the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and we know it's never simple, never easy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [windandthestars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/windandthestars/gifts).



> Title is from Taylor Swift's "Breathe." Dedicated, as always, to my partner in squee Windandthestars.

Sometimes, most of the time, flying just makes sense. It’s a science with instruments and flight plans, comforting numbers and load capacities when Krista needs cold, hard facts to keep her sanity. It’s nuance, it’s art when she’s flying instrument-blind and relying on her instincts and the way the air just _feels_ , the way she feels. Either way, science or intuition, flying is something that makes more sense to Krista than most everything else in her life.

People, for example. People didn’t make any sense half the time and while Krista will swear up and down to all comers that she’s _not_ a commitment phobe, she so is. She guesses that goes back to her mom, to waking up in the middle of the night one summer when the sky’s still on fire from the sun only to have Mel tell her that Mom would be back soon. Mom was coming back.

Mom never came back. Mom ran away to Quebec, last Krista checked, and she could care less what had happened to her since then. She was just an Ivarson by marriage, not by blood, and the North didn’t run in her veins the way it did she and Mel, Cece and his wife, Bobby. Even Bobby’s mother, half-French, had more spirit and love for the North than Krista’s mother ever did. Krista remembers tagging along behind him, behind Bobby and his dad, and hoping that someday she too could be a tracker and a pilot and all the things that the Martin boys were just naturally good at.

She’s no Indian, not like Bobby, but Silas and Bobby both said she learned okay for a white girl and that’s practically praise, coming from them. She’s not silent when she tracks but the game doesn’t usually hear her until it’s too late. She doesn’t come home with a dozen fish strung on her line but she usually can manage breakfast for a couple people on a good day. She shot her first moose up at Mel’s lodge at 12, right between the eyes, and was braver than most grown men when she did it. Hunting and fishing, like flying, they make sense.

Blake Laviolette doesn’t make sense at all. He wants things from her on his terms, a carefully delineated relationship with orchestrated outings and introductions to parents - Krista’s sure that if Blake had his way, she’d have been down to Winnipeg to meet his folks and dressed up in a too-short dress and too-high heels. That’s part of what the Fluevogs were about, anyway, impressing Blake; Krista’s much happier in her boots and flight gear any day of the week.

So she’s been playing keep away for months and it shouldn’t have surprised her when she found out that Blake’s been courted by Air Canada and accepted, sight unseen. He’s always thought about Yellowknife as a stepping stone to somewhere new, somewhere more exciting and he’s never looked at it the way Krista does, the way Bobby does: the North isn’t something you just pass through. Krista’s always thought that you had to have a strong heart to love the North. It’s beautiful, sure, but it’s harsh and full of dangers that can do you in six ways from Sunday.

Bobby would say loving the North is like loving Krista: gorgeous, yet treacherous. Bobby is a damn fool.

She’d actually been ready to be done with Blake Laviolette and his Manitoba manners (which is, to say, none at all) when Bobby’s ex started talking to her. Sure, she seems a little off but the truth of the matter is, Eva’s not saying anything Krista hasn’t heard in a million variations before from Loreen, from Cece, even Mel. Everyone’s been saying that she and Bobby should be a thing since they were both too short to walk through the snow after October and it’s that kind of depth, that kind of...magnetism that scares the shit out of her. What if it doesn’t work out? 

Bobby, for all his going down south for ten years, Bobby’s kind of a stable thing in Krista’s life. He’s always _there_ , even if Krista doesn’t want him there, and what if she gives in and he disappears like her mother? Like his father? Krista can’t take that chance, not with something, with someone who really matters. That’s what tips it for her, more than anything else, and when Bobby comes to her with fancy Vancouver shoes and eyes full of promises, she’s never been more grateful for Blake showing up and making a play for male dominance. It’s just easier to lean into it, to give Blake the sweet, simpering looks and while she sees a flash of hurt in Bobby’s eyes, she knows she’s done the right thing.

Sometimes the right thing just makes you feel like shit. Today is one of those days.

***

It’s just her and Blake on the flight back from Vancouver to Yellowknife and while it’s not a hard flight, it’s a long one, just a little over two hours. Krista’s not sure if she’d ever be cut out to fly the big jets like Blake apparently wants to; she’s too restless to even contemplate flying across country, much less across the ocean. She’s happy enough making jaunts up to Norman Wells or Holman, on a long day, or maybe over to Calgary and Edmonton. That’s it. She loves the North and she doesn’t really have any desire to leave. Alberta is pushing it far enough.

They’re about 45 minutes into the flight when she gets a chance to take her eyes off the instruments for a moment and talk to Blake. He’s scribbling in his log, probably just instrument notes for Loreen’s purposes, and Krista figures it’s all right to interrupt him. If it’s not, she’ll just ask forgiveness later; Ivarsons don’t do permission. It’s never really worked out for them when they have, after all, and Krista’s not about to start now.

“So I guess you’re stuck in the North, huh? In for the long haul? It’s a great place to grow up.” Krista’s never really talked about having kids but she’s always figured she will, someday, in the nebulous future. She’s never been the kind of girl to sketch out her wedding dress and plan her life down to the last beribboned detail and, again, since it’s been working out for her up until this point, she doesn’t plan to change it. Bobby used to say it was refreshing that she wasn’t like other girls.

Bobby is _so_ not the point of this conversation.

Blake stretches things out when he speaks and Krista likes to think it’s because he’s from Manitoba, where the plains stretch out all the way to the horizon and it’s flat with no mountains to break them up. Everything has to carry farther, maybe, and that’s why. She’s so focused on the differences that she doesn’t actually let his words sink in until a beat and a half later and then she’s so stunned that she’s still silent.

“I was thinking eventually I’d get the Air Canada contract and we’d move back to Winnipeg or maybe Ontario. Wherever the work is.”

Right. So all her dreams, everything she’s built here in the North, she’s supposed to just pick it up and move it at the whim of this guy? A little nagging voice in the back of her head points out that when you love someone, you do exactly that. Bobby’s mother had done it, after all, and there had been others. Dev came all the way from Delhi to see the Canadian North, experience its beauty. Krista guesses maybe not everyone looks at it the same way she does but she’s always, _always_ imagined that her life is going to play out right there in Yellowknife. 

Sure, she likes to travel. It’s fun to think about Mel losing his mind and giving her two weeks off so she can go to Hawaii or Europe or somewhere exciting but never long term. She’s not going to be like Bobby, run away down south, and she’s damn sure not going to pick up and move to _Winnipeg_. Not for Blake Laviolette. Not when the love she feels for him (if it’s even love - it might not be) doesn’t feel anything like Buttercup and Westley.

Maybe it’s a little immature to compare a real life relationship with entanglements and complications to a movie but, really, nothing is going to top that. Not in Krista’s book. And she feels like love ought to be this big epiphany, something that moves her like the Northern Lights or the sun rising over the mountains or the calm after a big snowstorm when the world’s all quiet.

It’s not like that with Blake. Krista’s not really sure if she should settle or not.

***

She’s quiet the whole way back and while it’s not exactly companionable silence, it’s comfortable, and they do the post-flight checks in the same silence. There’s no expectation (or at least Krista hasn’t given one) that Blake’s coming home with her so when he slides his arm around her shoulders right in front of Loreen, she cuts him a sharp look. He looks wounded and she relents but once they’re outside, she shakes her head.

“No, I need to clear my head for a bit. Long weekend, I want to get some rest. See you tomorrow, right?”

Blake lifts his hands up and shakes his head, clearly giving up, and when he goes back inside the office, the door slams a little harder than necessary. She’s bruised his ego, more than likely, but Krista can’t find it in herself to care. She’s got other things on her mind, complicated things, and Blake and his little-boy moods are just going to have to wait until she’s in the right frame of mind to deal with them.

The drive home is mostly a blur but that’s all right. Krista’s been in Yellowknife long enough to know the roads by rote memory and she doesn’t need to be on her toes when it’s not even snowing hard enough to stick on the asphalt. She gets her bag out (just one, always, because she is _so_ not high maintenance) and finds the Fluevogs box underneath. Bobby had bought them just because she said she liked them, no other reason, and it’s sort of...touching, in a way.

Bobby Martin has bought her a lot of things over the years but they usually end up being practical: a cup of coffee on a cold night, a new hunting rifle, fishing pole. It’s never been anything so frivolous as a pair of high heels she’s never going to get the chance to wear in bloody Yellowknife. It’s...the kind of thing you buy a woman you’re dating, if she’s honest, and that scares her.

Bobby _scares_ her. She’s never felt about someone the way she feels about him, deep emotions beneath the surface of the calm lake she always tries to be and Bobby can make her feel like a sixteen year old girl quicker than the crow can fly. Getting involved with Bobby means being uncertain, taking a risk and as much as Krista’s willing to push it up in the air, she doesn’t do that with her heart. That’s guarded because underneath the Ivarson bluster, she’s soft, and when Bobby left the first time, it _hurt_. She doesn’t want that hurt again.

So sometimes the right thing to do is also the hard thing to do and when she slides on the Fluevogs to dance around her kitchen like nobody’s watching, she tries not to think about how fantastic it would be if Bobby were there to spin her around like in the old days, like at prom, like that ill-advised night after Dry Grad.

It _so_ doesn’t surprise her that when her phone chirps, it’s Bobby and not Blake. What surprises her less is that she’s _happy_ it’s Bobby and not Blake and that it’s easy to fall into a mile a minute conversation with him just like nothing ever changed. He’s in Vegas, he’ll be home soon, did she like the shoes?

“Love the shoes, Bobby. Now _go_.”

The right thing, it’s never easy, but now she knows what she’s got to do whether it works out or not.


End file.
